Serving is a 100% viable and rewarding career and being dismissive of those that work in the service industry for wanting to make a living wage is disgusting. Reevaluate your life choices.
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Are you cheap if you don’t tip? (American tipping culture)
- Thread starter DongBeetle
- Start date
Serving is a 100% viable and rewarding career and being dismissive of those that work in the service industry for wanting to make a living wage is disgusting. Reevaluate your life choices.
In America, yes.
It's fine to hate the idea of tipping and how it's used to make customers subsidize cheap employers that don't want to pay a proper wage, but our system is what it is, so tip your server.
It's fine to hate the idea of tipping and how it's used to make customers subsidize cheap employers that don't want to pay a proper wage, but our system is what it is, so tip your server.
The tip IS their wage. You are effectively stealing a service from someone. The system is stupid, but that's the way it is. But hey keep using your class warfare "ideals" to effectively steal from the wait staff.
And I am not even going to touch your race comment. But yes, I would look down on anyone who's effectively poor, stealing from another effectively poor person. Its not like your not paying the restaurant owner (which usually aren't rich either unless your talking about a franchise), your stiffing solely the server.
$20 per person is probably the minimum for movers btw. More depending on the circumstances.
In Germany it's also custom to tip. About 10% id say. You don't have to, of course.
If your in America, thanks for stealing from the server. If you hire someone to mow your lawn would you then not pay them? When you go to a restaurant in the U.S. you walk in with a social contract to pay the wait staff. If you don't you just stole their service for free, fully knowing that you should be paying for their service.
It's literally not stealing though. Unless tipping is a legal requirement that I'm unaware of. You can use sensationalist language, but the reality is that it's not.
And yes I used race to make clear that there are a lot of impoverished and marginalised people besides waiters. Ignoring that and directing the vitriol that you should be directing at the employers and your legislators at them is misguided at best, and certainly very privileged.
My understanding is that waiting staff get much more money through the tip system than their counterparts do in other countries and in other US unskilled labour jobs because the tipping system and the creep upwards from ten to fifteen to twenty percent and beyond has nothing much to do with market forces in the labour market. So no wonder they don't want to go to a set wage. It can be a hard job but then so is labouring on a building site.
Waiters are paid more under the tipping structure than they would be otherwise. Their employers are not the villains here.
That's ridiculous. You're paying in the first place and they're getting paid whatever their wage is. How can you call that stealing? Silly.
If that's the case, then surely there's no harm if a particularly poor person can't tip sometimes. Since the waiters are earning more than them.
Waitstaff in the US are paid based on tips. If the tipping system didn't exist menu prices would be ~15% higher across the board.
This scenario is horribly out of sync with reality. It's a 15% markup. If you can afford $20 but not $23, something is very wrong. Just order takeout.
Waitstaff in the US are not all paid the same. It's state by state, city by city.
If you're not going to tip then don't go to a sit-down restaurant. Yes, you're cheap and obnoxious if you don't tip.
Believe it or not, but $3 can mean a lot to a poor person. Like that single mother scenario I gave. That can go towards something like milk and bread.
The tipping system and minimum wage match as a minimum downside guarantee are consistent even if the baseline guarantee differs from place to place.
Believe it or not your hypothetical situation doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you're pinching pennies to that degree, you aren't going to be eating out very much, even on special occasions.
I can only speak anecdotally, but generally it isn't poor people not tipping, and I think it is maligning poor people to assume they are the ones unable to. Like maybe 1% of your customer base is going to be in a position where they are literally unable to afford a tip. It doesn't explain the dozens upon dozens of other customers not tipping. There has been many a thread on here about food delivery drivers making like 30 stops a night and not getting a single cent in tips.
You think poor people don't try to treat themselves or their children sometimes? Or that they don't deserve to?
This conversation started because a member said if you're poor you should stay at home and make a sandwich. Not me generalising poor people. I am a former refugee and immigrant. I lived in a refugee camp at one point and fled civil war with my parents as a small child. I've been varying levels of poor my entire life.Thei idea that poor people do not deserve to ever have nice things is honestly insulting.
Poor people are defined by their lack of surplus funds.
And frankly, I think it's disgusting people are suggesting that the poor shouldn't eat out if they can't afford to pay their server more money than they themselves earn pro-rata for what are, with respect, pretty light duties.
I think if a 15% tax is too much for a $20 meal, you should find a $17 one instead.
Having a view like this shows you don't actually have any empathy for poor people, but okay.
No, it means I don't have any empathy for people deliberately screwing over other people for their own benefit.
This. The fundamental underlying issue is not fixed by not tipping the wait staff who rely on it. Unless the tipping wage laws change and they are properly compensated, witholding tips does not do much.
Obviously as long ask he could get the person to mow his lawn and not pay him and not be put in jail he would. He pretty much said if he's not forced to pay he's not going to do it, not his problem. So yeah, if he could get away with it, he wouldn't pay them.
User Warned: Inappropriate commentary
As some have stated its culture.
So you're gonna call someone not familiar with our bullshit culture or it's standards or entitlement and asshole?
People like you mentioned are despciable but what about people that Geoff or Mist mention?
Tipping is bullshit and kirblar laid out the basic reason why. Not only that servers make more money in this system than if it was more fair. I'm suppose to automatically pay more to a server after the fact as well, so lets cut the stealing crap. It's a ruse for money and what's worse it is hinges on ignorance and entitltement.
I pay my servers for good service or good food nothing more. I don't get it you get a shit tip and I'm on my way. before you talk I did my time in HS and College in the industry and it was garbage I'd rather work in games or be a whore than go back to bullshit of the service industry.
But also let's talk about food delivery apps and how this is just an extra burden on the service industry. Servers are managing all the orders coming in but not seeing a cent from that. The restaurant could be dead get a deluge of delivery app orders and then actual patrons are left questioning why their food is taking so long coming out, blaming the server and reducing their tips.
Eh, as someone who has been working as a waiter for a couple months now...strong disagree. Waiters should just be paid full wages. There is no reason the consumer should be essentially subsidizing over half of my pay instead of my employer. It also encourages infighting among back of house and front of house.
It's nice when you get a particularly large tip, but it also stings incredibly badly when you don't get tipped at all or business is slow.
I find this statement terribly ironic. Here we are discussing servers like they make 50k annual.
The server is most likely the single mother you are discussing.
In America, you don't tip you're a cheapskate. Tipping system sucks and I wish there were a better way that everyone can agree on, but until fairer wages are instituted, that's just the way it is. People who have the gall to go out, enjoy a meal and then take some moral stand against tipping as though the wait staff will clap and thank them for it...to steal a phrase from the cool kids, they ain't slick.
This includes tourists from countries where tipping isn't normative. Don't spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to visit and then cheap out once the bill comes.
This includes tourists from countries where tipping isn't normative. Don't spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to visit and then cheap out once the bill comes.
Sounds like you gotta save that money to donate to Trump 2020. With that good ol' fuck you got mine attitude.
Refusing to tip hurts your server. Full stop. Not being privileged is not an excuse to hurt others.
If you want to campaign for living wages and better lives for low income workers, that's great! But if you don't tip those people who rely on tips, you are a hypocrite and a piece of shit
The employers suffer from a problem where if only they swap, they get hurt. You can only swap that at a systemic level, and the waiters (as a whole) will fight that because as you go up the income ladder in the group that gap will get bigger and bigger. Which is why we're stuck with working with working within the margins of what we've got.
Also nonwhite servers are more likely to get lower tips or stiffed, it's an argument for mandatory baseline tips in order to partially counteract it.
Right lol. All the mental loopholes being used to justify effectively stealing.
I shouldn't be expected to subsidise somebody's wages just because their employer pays them a derisory hourly rate, it's unfair to put that burden on others especially those barely getting by themselves. I'm glad that this isn't a controversy in Europe because we have effective minimum wage laws.
you are required to report tips so that they can be taxed. Whether the reporting is accurate is up to the waiter and restaurant but they would have to report at least the minimum wage worth of tips.
But you are effectively paying them. Just it reflects in the price of the food you buy which considers wage costs as part of the price. Just in the US the laws made it easy for both customers and employers to skip out on paying the servers fairly.
The prices are cheaper here than they are in Europe. The tips are effectively a dedicated % of revenue going directly to workers resulting in higher FOH salaries.
The price you pay in Europe baseline will be our tax plus tip price.